Gold Standard Phantoms are happy to announce that it has secured an additional £840,000 in private investment, in order to bring its first product to market and establish itself as a key provider of calibration services for clinical quantitative medical imaging worldwide.
GSP was founded in 2014 with the aim of providing a solution to the issue of calibration and quality assurance in quantitative medical imaging. It was the receiver of the prestigious Small Business Research Initiative Healthcare's Phase I and Phase II awards in 2015 and 2016 for a total of £1.1 million, which enabled it to bring its first product, an imaging standard for Arterial Spin Labelling Perfusion MRI, from early stage prototype through to commercial product. It has also, together with the National Physical Laboratory and NEL, been awarded a £170,000 project from Innovate UK’s 'Analysis for Innovators' competition to create a 'traceable calibration for an MRI perfusion measurement'.
GSP's first product, QASPER, is an advanced calibration phantom for Arterial Spin Labelling (ASL). Its features include a unique MRI-compatible pump design, the use of proprietary technology to simulate capillary blood flow, and is calibrated to international standards.
ASL is a magnetic resonance imaging technique for measuring tissue perfusion using a freely diffusible intrinsic tracer. ASL is non-invasive in nature and offers the ability to quantitatively measure tissue perfusion, which makes this method ideal for research and clinical studies. Recent technical advances have increased its sensitivity and extended its potential applications; it is now available for routine clinical practice in many institutions.
Quantitative Medical Imaging is not yet a clinical reality. Despite wide acceptance in research, intrinsically quantitative methods such as ASL are still not used in daily clinical practice due to the lack of internationally recognised standards and governance to enable quality assurance of quantitative data. As such, our first product will provide the enabling step to make the clinical use of quantitative ASL possible.
With this investment, Gold Standard Phantoms welcomes Frédéric Schenk, Group Vice President at SGS, and Riccardo Pavoncelli of Augmenta Capital to GSP's Board of Directors.
